ANDREAS DILGER

I started graduate studies at the University of Calgary. in the fall of 1994. I graduated in 1991 from the U of C with a BSc in Electrical Engineering and a Minor in Computer Science. Between 1991 and 1994, I worked in Calgary for IBM. One of the highlights of this period was working on the Victoria Commonwealth Games Install Team for IBM, sponsor of information systems to the games.

While I was in graduate studies, my research interests were in video compression, computer graphics, and distributed computing. I worked on a distributed processing approach to fractal block coding of video sequences.

For a few years I was back working at IBM as an AIX Services Specialist, contracting to customers for installation and maintenance of RS/6000 AIX systems and SP2 supercomputers. There's nothing like working on a cluster with 100 CPUs, 32 GB of RAM, and 600GB+ of disk... In 1997, that is... Because of my AIX background, I was playing with LVM for Linux, and as a result, I developed an online ext2 resizer so you can grow a filesystem without unmounting it!

After a brief stint working for Stelias Computing, doing filesystem development work, Stelias has merged into Turbolinux, or more specifically Turbolabs. During this time my main development work is in enterprise storage systems, including Object Based Storage and the InterMezzo network filesystem. We also worked on a snapshot filesystem VFS layer for Linux. This gives me lots of Linux kernel filesystem development experience, including the ext3 journalled filesystem.

At Turbolinux I also spent almost a year working on PowerCockpit a Linux cluster deployment and management tool.

Now I'm back working on Linux filesystems and storage, for Cluster File Systems, which is again dealing with the Object Based Storage technology I was working on at Stelias. This has grown into a very sophisticated distributed storage system called Lustre, which is designed to scale to thousands of nodes and many petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage. Like my AIX/SP2 days, I'm again playing with some very big machines .

I developed a small utility library + tool, called blkid for identifying the type of filesystem (or other content like swap or partition labels) of a partition/disk. It will allow you to locate devices by LABEL or UUID (if the content supports this), and also can give you some basic data about some filesystems like total size and free space. It is designed to remove the proliferation of duplicate code in fsck, mount, dump, etc. This code is now part of e2fsprogs, version 1.33 and later.

On July 21, 2000 my first son Maximilian Eric Dilger was born, and I have a few photos online.

On May 2, 2002 my daughter Anna Lynn Dilger was born, and I put some photos toghether (thanks to my Dad for the use of his digital Camera). Note that it is somewhat slow to do web pages with a baby in one hand - but it is possible.

In Calgary we are blessed by being near the spectacular Canadian Rocky Mountains. I enjoy camping, hiking, and skiing a great deal. I also enjoy many other outdoor activities. Another interest of mine is ray-tracing.

I am one of the contributing authors to the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) specification, as well as one of the contributing authors and the former maintainer of the reference PNG library, libpng. PNG is a lossless raster image format designed to replace GIF because of its technical shortcomings and patent encumbrance. PNG is designed to be simple, flexible, extensible without sacrificing compatibility, and highly compressed without losing image content. The ownership of the PNG specification has been transferred to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for consideration as the standard WWW raster image format. It is also in the final stages of becoming an ISO standard image format. Most graphics applications and WWW browsers now support PNG images, including the 4.x and later versions of Netscape Navigator and MSIE.

I have also created a popular Linux Logo which includes, of course, our favourite Penguin Tux.

If you are having problems viewing some of the images on this site, it is because you are using a web browser that doesn't support PNG graphics. I suggest upgrading the browser to a PNG supporting browser. Please see this site for more information about why I don't have any GIF images here.

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